The summary is a tad misleading. It states that most who protested this work on the Symbian OS. So they are protesting because lots will probably lose their jobs. Not because they hold in their belief that the partnership is bad.

You've been wasting a lot of time. Microsoft has their own product for managing their own images. It's called Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). You can use it to deploy/update XP, Vista, 2003 Server, and Server 08. It stores the files in a .wim format. It's pretty neat, as it uses a write once type database so you can have multiple images in 1 wim to save on space.

At work we use a single image to manage over 200 different computer models that can be deployed in a myriad of ways such as LiteTouch methodology which you can use either Microsoft s Deployment Server to push via PXE boot or just the good old fashion thumb drive. Or you can use the ZeroTouch methodology and use SMS to update/deploy systems without any interaction (Good for kiosk type systems).

In a nutshell, MDT takes all the best practices for deployment (Litetouch, ZeroTouch, Automatic driver injection, user state migration, etc.) and rolls it into one application.